‘Yes,’ she said, almost grudgingly. ‘I told you a few months back that I believed in you. Well, I do. I believe in what you can be when you’re confident. Not when you’re arrogant, but when you’re confident. When you decide to do something, really decide, you do amazing things. I wish you could be that person a little more often.’
I scratched my head. ‘I think that person is a lie, Bastille. I’m not confident. I just get lucky.’
‘You get lucky a lot. Particularly when we really need it. You saved your father, you got the Sands back, you rescued the kings.’
‘That last one was mostly you,’ I said with a grimace.
‘The idea that got us free was yours,’ she said, ‘and you spotted Archedis.’ I shrugged.
‘It seems that when I get desperate, my mind works better. I’m not sure if that’s something to be proud of or not.’
‘Well, it’s what we’ve got,’ Bastille said, ‘so we’re going to work with it. I’ll organize the troops. You be confident, give the Mokians the sense that someone’s in charge. Together, we’ll hold this city together until the Old Smedry gets here.’
‘He’ll probably be late, you know.’
‘Oh, I’m certain he will be,’ Bastille said. ‘The question isn’t, “Will he be late?” The question is, “How late is he going to be?”’
I nodded grimly.
‘You ready to be a king?’ she asked.
I hesitated just briefly. ‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ she said, spinning as screams erupted from the center of the city. ‘Because I think another group of Librarians just tunneled in.’
070706
Don’t yawn.
I shouldn’t have agreed to be king. If you’ve been following these books, you know that my early experiences set me up to fail. Being a celebrity made me think that I was much more important than I really was, and success led me to take more responsibility than I should have. That all meant I fell really far when I did fall.
You yawning yet? No? Good. You most definitely don’t want to part your lips, suck in that sweet air, and feel the relaxing release as you stretch and let your mouth open wide. You itch to do it; you’ve been reading for a while now, and you’re getting a little groggy. But don’t yawn. Really, don’t do it.
Accepting the crown of Mokia, if even for a short time, was the culminating peak of my spiral to fame. The events of this siege became infamous. In fact, I didn’t realize what I’d done until long afterward. (After leaving Mokia, after all, I returned to the Hushlands.)
Some Hushlanders think we yawn to increase oxygen to the brain, but researchers have recently discounted this theory. In this case, they’re right. In the Free Kingdoms, it’s been known for a long time that yawns frighten away bloogynaughts. You know what bloogynaughts are, don’t you? They’re those things that sneak up on people while they’re reading books, lurking just behind them, watching them, edging closer and closer until they’re right there. Behind you. Breathing on your neck. About ready to grab you. A yawn would scare it away. If only you could yawn . . .
Why did I agree to be king? I should have said no. And yet I didn’t. I let them make me king. I let Bastille persuade me. I let them set me up high.
Why? Well, perhaps for the same reason that – when reading the paragraphs above – you had a powerful urge to yawn or even glance over your shoulder. Talk about something long enough, and people will start thinking about it. It’s kind of like a twisted, funky kind of mind control. Bastille was a princess, my family had once held thrones, and I was related distantly to pretty much every monarch in the Free Kingdoms. I guess I wanted to feel what it was like to be king.
(In the end, I discovered that being a king feels pretty much like being a regular person, only people shoot at you more often.)
Bastille and I charged through the city, racing toward the screams. Mokian men and women threw down the things they had been working on and rallied to the breach. Bastille slipped her sunglasses on, and I nodded to her. She took off at a much faster speed, leaving me behind as she used her enhanced Crystin speed to dart toward the disturbance.
I ran much more slowly, but I made a fair showing of it. The last half a year or so had been very good for my constitution. If you want to practice for a footrace, I’d highly recommend the Alcatraz Smedry training regimen. It involves being chased by Librarians, half-metal monsters, evil apparitions, sentient romance novels, fallen Knights of Crystallia, and the occasional evil chicken named Moe. Our success rate in training footrace winners is 95 percent. Unfortunately, our survival rate is about 5 percent, so it kind of balances everything out.
A group of Mokians filled in around me, running at my same speed. At first I thought they were joining me to rush to the scene of the disturbance. However, they were keeping too close. I realized with shock that they were an honor guard, of the type that run around protecting kings and saying, ‘Who dares disturb the king?’ and stuff like that. That made me feel important.
Even running as fast as we could, we arrived too late to help with the fighting. The Librarians had come out of a large, gopher-hole-like pit in the ground of a large green field near what I’d later learn was Mokian Royal University. Some bodies lay on the ground, and it made my stomach twist to see how many were Mokian. At least they weren’t dead. Of course, being in a coma was even worse, in many ways.
You may be shocked at how ‘civilized’ war is out in the Free Kingdoms. However, realize that they do what they do for a reason. If the Librarians could capture Tuki Tuki, they could get the antidote for the sleeping sickness – and they’d get nearly their entire army back to keep fighting, moving inward, to conquer more of the Free Kingdoms. It made sense for the Librarians to encourage the use of the coma-guns and coma-spears.
This latest group of Librarian infiltrators, strangely, looked like they’d surrendered soon after climbing out of the hole. Why hadn’t they fought longer? They stood with their hands up, surrounded by ragged Mokian fighters. Bastille watched nearby, arms folded, looking dissatisfied. Likely because she hadn’t gotten a chance to stab anyone.
The Mokians should have been happy to have won the skirmish so easily. But most of them just looked exhausted. The field was lit by torches on long poles rammed into the ground, and boulders still struck the dome protecting the city. Each one seemed to crack it a little bit more.
‘We can’t hold out!’ said one of the spear-wielding Mokians. ‘Look! They know they can surrender if we rally to fight them. There are so many of them that they’re content to lose an entire team to knock out a few of us.’